The Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Clinical Medicine at Faculty of Health at Aarhus University invites applications for a position as a research assistant for a new research project, ‘The New Parent Sleep Experience: sensitivity to infant signaling across genders and culture’. The project is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation: http://bit.ly/Carlsberg_project as per 1st September 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter. The position is a fixed-term 12 month full-time position.

The Interacting Minds Center (IMC)

The project will be hosted at IMC, a center which provides a transdisciplinary platform to study human interaction. The candidate will have the opportunity to interact and collaborate with researchers from the humanities, social sciences, cognitive science, biology and medicine, among other fields. The IMC hosts weekly guest lectures and regular intensive workshops, with both international and national speakers. The Center has affiliated researchers across numerous faculties and departments at Aarhus University, with access to excellent research facilities and infrastructure at the Cognition and Behavior Lab, and the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience.
You can read more about the center here and about the faculty here.

Your job responsibilities

As a research assistant, your primary tasks are related to data collection, analysis and dissemination. The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the overall objectives of the project. The position will require a candidate who is enthusiastic about complex data analysis.
Data collection will be supported by student assistants, so there will be an opportunity to supervise the work of junior team members. The successful candidate will be supported in planning future career activities.

The research project

Our knowledge of early parenting comes largely from studies of mothers, with fathers either overlooked or under-emphasized. As fathers constitute 50% of parents, and have become increasingly involved in childcare, this project will explore similarities and differences between men and women’s experiences in early parenthood. The project will use legislative changes to parental leave (Barsel) in August 2022 as a natural experiment. We will compare the behavior of couples with babies born before and after the increase in earmarked paternity leave from 2 weeks to 11 weeks. This project will comprise a series of studies using complementary methods, from surveys, to large scale app-based assessments of real-world parenting behavior, and experimental tasks.
In your daily work, you have a close interaction with competent colleagues.

Your main tasks will consist of:

• Research tasks on parenting behavior
• Participant recruitment and data collection
• Data analysis, including cleaning, quality control, interpretation
• Report writing and dissemination tasks

You will report to Associate Professor Christine Parsons (Project Lead).

Your competences

You have a background within the research area of psychology, medicine, cognitive Science, data Science or a related field. Experience or the following skills will be considered an advantage:

• Participant recruitment, collecting data
• Data management
• Good data analysis skills, including advanced statistical and methodological knowledge (such as multilevel modelling, Structural Equation modelling etc.)
• Basic technical skills and knowledge (e.g., general programming skills in R, Python or equivalent)

As a person, you have good interpersonal skills, are friendly and helpful and able to contribute to a good work environment. We expect you to be fluent in oral and written English.

Questions about the position

If you have any questions about the position, please contact Associate Professor Christine Parsons: tel.: +45 8716 2127. Applicants are encouraged to write with any informal enquiries.

Your place of work will be the Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Clinical Medicine, Nobelparken, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 3. Etage. DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.

We expect to conduct interviews in the first week of August 2022.